November 30, 2010

ASTRO BOY

No, not the stupid movie that came out a couple years ago, the 80's animated series!!!

I was a HUGE Astroboy fan as a kid.
Then, a few years ago, they released a box set of the entire series.
I bought it, and started watching the episodes.
To my surprise... they were different. The writing was a bit different, the voices were completely different, and most of the character names were altered.

This baffled me for quite some time, until I found out that the version I had purchased was the U.S./Australian version. Translated and written from the original Japanese to the English version for American and Australian audiences.

So why was it so different from what I had recalled as a child? Once Canadian broadcaster bought the show (originally seen on ATV), they re-tranlated and re-dubbed in both Canadian English and French. Little did I know that the version us Canadians saw was drastically diffrent from what the rest of the world had seen.

Upon viewing all the DVDs of the U.S. version I noticed that the main negative part was the awful voice acting and changes to the scripts. But on the plus side, it would display the "unedited version", I imagine the Canadian television braodcasters deemed some scenes to be too dark or contentious for young Canandian audiences. So I'd witness scenes with a bit more violence than what I rememberd as a kid.

At any rate, no one on the Internets seemed to know what I was talking about when I first brought this up 5 years ago, the "Canadian Astroboy" seemed to have been a rare phenomenon that no one knew about, or remembered out, or cared about. Until now!

I told you I wasn't crazy! And here it is!.... Hahahhahahahaha...
It even has the recap at the end that was exclusive to the Canadian version as well, the whole "life-lessons" that 80s cartoons are popular for. I had forgotten how funky the music could be in this series. This particular episode was great, Astro fights off lots of Martians on planet Mars, uncovers a big conspiracy and nearly dies in the belly of an alien ship.

I'm quite certain it will NEVER come out unfortunately.it was an independent thing that the Canadian broadcaster did, whoever owns the DVD publishing rights to Astro would have no reason to release this version.